libavg uses modern OpenGL to render display contents. This means that the GPUs and drivers in use need to be installed correctly and work well. In most cases, they do, and when they don't, we make an effort to work around bugs in drivers. On the other hand, we don't have all hardware and driver combinations at hand, so if things are broken in different ways than described here, please report an issue.

This page lists GPU/driver combinations for the different plattforms and how to deal with them. Note that most virtual machines don't have very good OpenGL support, and things will often break. Unfortunately, the number of possible combinations of VM software, host and client make it hard to test this.

For Macs with Intel GPUs, a number of FXNodes are disabled by default. This is because some older OS X drivers had an issue that caused hard lockups of the machine (See https://github.com/libavg/libavg/issues/434). On newer Macs, this doesn't occur, but since we con't say for sure when the bug was fixed, the FXNodes remain disabled. To reenable them manually, set <shaderusage>full</shaderusage> in ~/.avgrc.

The proprietary drivers for NVidia and ATI GPUs work flawlessly. If you have one of these GPUs, make sure you install them, because the open source drivers are simply not suited for serious graphics work yet. Newer Intel GPUs work as well (although there's a bug in the screen capture functions: https://github.com/libavg/libavg/issues/634), but older ones have serious issues.